A Small Death in lisbon Read Free Page B

anyway: serious and dependable. His irritated look said: defiant, touchy. His first words? Direct, candid, perceptive said: uncompromising. A difficult combination for a policeman. I could see why nobody else would have him.
    'I didn't know about London,' he said.
    'My father was over there,' I said. 'So what
do
you know about?'
    'Your father was an army officer. You spent a lot of time in Africa. In Guinea. You've been seventeen years on the force, eight of them as a homicide detective.'
    'Have you accessed my file?'
    'No. I asked
Engenheiro
Narciso. He didn't tell me everything,' he said, sucking in his thick coffee. 'He didn't say what rank your father was for instance.'
    António's eyebrows switched back again and a glint of partisan interest came from deep in his eye sockets. A political question: was my father one of the younger officers who started the 1974 revolution, or old guard? Both men waited.
    'My father was a colonel,' I said.
    'How did he end up in London?'
    'Ask him,' I said, nodding to António, no appetite for this.
    'How long have you got?' he asked, gripping the edge of the bar.
    'No time at all,' I said. 'There's a dead body waiting for us on the beach.'
    We crossed the gardens to the Marginal and went through the underpass to a small car park in front of the Clube Desportivo de Paço de Arcos. There was a dried-fish and diesel smell amongst the old boats lying on their sides or propped up on tyres amongst rusted trailers and rubbish bins. A halved oil drum was smoking with two planks of wood burning to heat a pan of oil. A couple of fishermen I knew were ignoring the scene and sorting through the marker buoys and crab and lobster pots in front of their corrugated iron work shacks. I nodded and they looked across to the crowd that had already formed even at this early hour.
    The line of people that had gathered at the low stone balustrade on the edge of the beach and along the harbour wall were looking down on to the sand. Some broad-backed working women had taken time out to distress themselves over the tragedy, muttering through their fingers:
    '
Ai Mãe, coitadinha.
' O mother, poor little thing.
    There were four or five
Polícia de Seguranza Pública
boys ignoring the total contamination of the crime scene and talking to two members of the
Polícia Marítima.
Another two hours and there'd be girls on the beach to chat up and then not even the
Polícia Marítima
would have had a look in. I introduced myself and asked them who'd found the body. They pointed to a fisherman sitting further along the harbour wall. The position of the body above the flattened sand of the highest tide mark told me that the victim hadn't been washed up but dumped, thrown, from just about where I was standing, off the harbour wall. It was a three-metre drop.
    The
Polícia Marítima
were satisfied that the body hadn't been washed up but wanted it confirmed from the pathologist that there was no water in the lungs. They gave me authority to start my investigation. I sent the PSP men along the harbour wall to move the onlookers back to the road.
    The police photographer made himself known and I told him to take shots from above as well as down on the beach.
    The girl's naked body was twisted at the waist, her left shoulder buried in the sand. Her face, with just a single graze on the forehead, was turned upwards, eyes wide open. She was young, her breasts still high and rounded not far below her clavicles. The muscle of her torso was visible below the rib cage and she carried a little puppy fat on her belly. Her hips lay flat, her left leg straight, the right turned out at the knee, its heel close to her buttock and right hand which was thrown behind her. I'd put her at under sixteen and I could see why the fisherman hadn't bothered to go down to look for life. Her face was pale apart from the cut, the lips purple and her intensely blue eyes vacant. There were no footprints around the body. I let the photographer down there to